Archive for the ‘Technology’ category

Although the term mrp was coined by Joe Orlicky back in the 1940s and ERP came along in the late 80s there are still many organizations that don’t truly understand the value of ERP.

While streamlining and automating your financial processes is a huge benefit, that is only one piece to a much larger puzzle.

Successful ERP solutions enable businesses to capture, manage and translate data into business insight from a wide range of activities.

An erp system is not just a typewriter- it makes the right data available in the right context for informed contextual decision making at all levels of the operation.

Both for key business tactical operational decisions, the Sales and Operation plan, the budgets, forecasts and strategies, the short and the long term, erp is the glue that aligns your business processes, plans delegates work, monitors and reports and notifies progress and helps to evaluate changes, threats and opportunities and to manage constraints and priorities

Erp can help create new levels of efficiency and reduce manual tasks through streamlining, and directed process automation, a and exception reporting and dashboards.. It can reduce errors with profiles, policies and templates, and provide more control with workflow processes, and analysis tools.

ERP provides a platform to re-engineer your business processes to fit with best practices, and adapt to changing technology and market demands and opportunities. Understand your real across and how you make profits-which customers and products. What if different scenarios.

Ultimately, ERP is a platform on which to design a better business. Organizations who don’t share this vision for ERP will struggle to reach a solid ROI.

ERP used to be reserved for large organizations, who could afford to take on such an expensive transformation. However, thanks to advances both in technology and infrastructure, and changes in licensing modules, and the emergence of cloud technology ERP solutions are accessible and affordable to businesses of any size through the cloud.

Organizations no longer have to invest half their earnings into hardware and IT staff, and can get up and running much quicker than ever before.

Be open to change

ERP is not about fitting your existing practices to a technology system. While that may apply in some aspects, the goal is really to improve your processes with a system that can enhance their accuracy, automate them, and integrate with your partners and suppliers.

While a budget usually can put a cap on ERP projects, don’t settle for less than what’s possible. There are many ways to utilize ERP when you understand what others have done and what is possible. Don’t buy a Ferrari and drive it in first gear and skimp on servicing and driver training. Don’t spend money on endless reports and customisations to suit every employee’s whim. Be prepared withy our report design, business processes and data – use self elearning resources, get involved early so you can do your own testing, and use consultants for where they can most add value without wasting their time.

Key factors

An ERP implementation can literally transform your business, but also carries a certain level of risk. Projects can fail to reach positive ROI if the following factors aren’t met:
◾Support from senior management
◾Planning: time, roles, scope, budget and process analysis
◾Consultation and support, both functional and technical
◾Go-live process: phased vs. big bang
◾Training, available resources, and user willingness to adopt. ◾Test! Test every aspect of the system with each of your users as much as possible before going live.

Find out why every Synergy project goes live on time to budget- in 23+ years no Synergy project has ever failed to go live and none has ever needed reimplementation.

Over 57 million people worldwide choose Wix to create stunning web sites.

1. Choose a website template
2. Customize it the way you want
3. Publish online instantly

Wix.com offers a comprehensive web creation solution, including hundreds of designer-made templates, an intuitive drag-and-drop website editor, the ability to integrate business management applications through the Wix App Market, mobile and e-commerce capabilities, and much more.

Microsoft and Wix have partnered to bring simple website development to Office 365.
Customers will be able to select Wix as a web-hosting provider – or just use Wix to build a website to be hosted with Microsoft.

Wix fills a web development void that was created when Microsoft shut down the Public Website feature of SharePoint in December 2014. Microsoft didn’t feel the service got enough use to warrant continued investment and support. It seems there is enough demand, that Microsoft then felt it necessary to partner with a third-party to provide that service for Office 365 customers.

The Wix App Market contains a diverse array of elements to add to your website. There are apps for comments, events calendar, testimonials, social networks, live chat, maps, and more. You can however build a website for free,. Much of what Wix has to offer is ‘freemium’ – most of the tools in the Wix App Market offer both a free and a premium version. You can use the tool for free. Accessing the full power and features of the tool to make a website a business rather than just a slick looking page on the web will likely cost a few dollars and probably still require some outside help or self tuition to get these configured and functioning properly. Things like: setting up SSL encryption or building a functioning shopping cart generally take more than just a drag-and-drop.

Subscribers still using Microsoft to host a domain will be able to connect the domain to a new site built on Wix.

Power BI is a cloud service that lets you share, collaborate and access your Excel reports anywhere on any device.
This toolset is regularly being updated with new features e.g.: – dashboards, new visualizations, support for popular software-as-a-service applications, a native iPad app and live “hybrid” connectivity to on-premise SQL Server Analysis Services tabular models.

Dynamics Ax provides in built cubes and Power BI for Power BI use- ( see our Dynamics Ax HR and Payroll Powwr BI demonstration.)

Power BI dashboards
Users can create personalized dashboards to monitor their most important data. A dashboard combines on-premises and cloud-born data in a single pane of glass, providing a consolidated view across the organization regardless of where the data lives.

Users can easily explore all their data using intuitive, natural language capabilities and receive answers in the form of charts and graphs. They can also explore data through detailed reports that target specific aspects of their business. Visuals from these reports can also be pinned to their dashboards for continuous monitoring. As part of this experience new visualizations have been added including combo charts, filled maps, gauges, tree maps, and funnel charts.

What is Power BI Q&A?
Use natural language queries to find answers in your own data.
With instantaneous natural language querying, Q&A interprets your question and immediately serves up the correct answer on the fly—in the form of an interactive chart or graph. And these visualizations change dynamically as you modify the question, creating a truly interactive experience with your data
Start with a question, and have fun traveling through your data refining or expanding your question, uncovering trust-worthy new information, zeroing in on details and zooming out for a broader view.
You’ll be delighted by the insights and discoveries you make.

Power BI Q&A presents your answers in the form of visualizations. As you type a question, Power BI Q&A picks the best visual to display your answer; and the visual changes dynamically as you modify the question.
The experience is truly interactive…and fast! Powered by an in-memory storage, response is almost instantaneous.

With the new Power BI connector for SQL Server Analysis Services, customers can realize the benefits of a cloud-based BI solution without having to move their data to the cloud. Customers can now create a secure connection to an “on-premises” SQL Server Analysis Services server from Power BI in the cloud. When users view and explore dashboards and reports, Power BI will query the on-premise model using the user’s credentials.

With this hybrid solution, organizations can continue to retain, manage and secure their data on-premises, while securely enabling users to benefit from that data via Power BI.

Mobile Apps
A wave of native mobile apps for Power BI. These apps will allow users to access their Power BI dashboards and reports through immersive mobile experiences for iPad, iPhone, and Windows tablets. The first of these – the iPad app is available today and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store, with other platforms following in the coming months. All Power BI mobile apps enable users to share insights and collaborate with colleagues so that they can take immediate action, from anywhere, anytime.

Microsoft lifted the veil on its upcoming Windows 10 operating system. Microsoft: Windows 10 will be free for Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 users for 1 year after launch.
When the software is released later this year across desktops, smartphones, and tablets. Expect numerous changes:
- A modernized Start Menu, better multitasking with Task View, and UI improvements.
- Refreshed and more modern icons
- An Action Center provides instant access to common tasks like enabling or shutting off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other settings.
-Notifications are synced across devices, so if you dismiss something on a Windows 10 smartphone or tablet, then it won’t pop up again when you return to your PC.
- Microsoft has refreshed the appearance of settings menus everywhere with a much cleaner, easy-to-understand design.
– A new, Metro-style (and very sleek) Calendar app that’s consistent across PCs, tablets, and phones.
- Photos – weed out duplicates and “clutter” when you’re syncing photos from every device you own. Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage ismuch smarter about displaying a “simple view of all your photos.
- A new Photos app will automatically enhance and touch up photos, remove blemishes like red eye and ensure you end up with the right exposure.
- Windows 10 users can also expect new apps for: People, Maps, and Music.
- Microsoft’s personal assistant Cortana provides powerful search and reminder capabilities to Windows 10. . Microsoft says “you’ll see Cortana as never before” In Windows 10, it will serve as the primary search tool for a massive audience of Windows users. Cortana ‘speaks’ with a natural, conversational flow.
- Belfiore launched into the first demonstration of Windows 10 on phones, showing off a new Messages app with Skype integration, a fully-adjustable keyboard, and other improvements.
- Microsoft has all-new, universal apps for Windows 10. First is Outlook, with the Word engine built in for comprehensive styling and extra formatting capabilities no matter from what device you’re checking email. Desktop users can also personalize Outlook with a background image of their choice
- Microsoft is working hard on a new web browser, referred to as Project Spartan. Highlighting something on a page is as simple as circling your finger around it — no Surface pen or stylus required. Using a mouse also works fine; click on any section of a website to type out a comment for sharing with co-workers or friends.
- A new Reading Mode puts articles in a layout that’s easier on your eyes
- Microsoft is also introducing a Reading List that syncs content across phones, tablets, and PCs for later. (Apple has had similar functionality in iOS and OS X for some time now- but what Apple doesn’t have in its browser is Cortana. Microsoft’s personal assistant is everywhere in Project Spartan. She’ll tell you the weather in the URL bar. Visit a restaurant’s website, and Cortana will provide a map, menu information, and contact details should you decide to head there for dinner.)

It is a standalone Windows Desktop application that can be downloaded from the Power BI site.

This application combines Power Query, Power Pivot Data Model and Power View into a seamless experience that will allow customers to build their Power BI elements in an offline fashion and then upload to the Power BI Service.

The Add-ins for Excel 2013 and later are still available and customers can continue to use that to model their data and build reports.

The Power BI Designer will be another option and allow customers with an older version of Office to be able to create reports.

New Benchmarks for Dynamics Ax with summary and detail documents for each benchmark.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Benchmark for Multiple Retail Workloads

- In 2014, Microsoft conducted a benchmark to measure the performance and scalability characteristics of the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 retail solution in a simulated retail scenario.
- The benchmark showcases the ability of AX 2012 R2 to handle various specialized loads concurrently, without compromising performance and scalability on critical business processes.
- The benchmark includes many functional scenarios across different client and integration technologies, thereby providing a view of retail back-end scenarios.

The following scenarios were executed to complete the benchmark:
• Trickle feed of point of sale (POS) transactions from stores
• Posting trade agreements to stores
• Publishing product assortments to stores, including converting pre-actions to actions

End-of-day processing of POS transactions:
• Inventory reservations were made for the imported transactions.
• Imported POS transactions were consolidated and aggregated, and then transferred to statements in a peak-load situation.
• Statements were processed and transferred to sales orders, and financial updates were posted.

Multiple different workloads were simulated:
• A set of financial transactions was run concurrently.
• A batch of 500 general ledger (GL) journals of 1,000 journal lines each was posted in a separate test.
• A set of management reporter reports and scenarios was executed.
• A year-end closing process was run in a separate test.
• A consolidation process was run in a separate test.

The benchmark was modeled for two financial periods, previous period and current period. It assumed a customer in a closing state for the previous period while entering regular business transactions in the current period.
For the closing process (for example, the summary trial balance), some transaction data was created in the previous period before the benchmark run.

The defined scenarios were run with 500 concurrent financial users who generated load on the Application Object Server (AOS) instances by using the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 Benchmark SDK.

The overall benchmark result shows the capability of Microsoft Dynamics AX and Management Reporter to handle core financial scenarios with volume data while maintaining good performance measures.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 Day in the Life Benchmark for Retail and DistributionMicrosoft conducted a 24-hour “day in the life” benchmark of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 to measure the application’s performance and scalability characteristics when running retail and distribution workloads.

The benchmark ran a variety of functional scenarios that use different client and integration technologies, thereby providing a broad view of enterprise resource planning (ERP) workload performance on AX 2012 R3.

• The initial benchmark run showcased the daytime and nighttime activities at a complex customer installation that has 2,000 stores, each with 10 point of sale (POS) devices

These scenarios generated load on an instance of Application Object Server (AOS). In this benchmark, some AOS instances are configured as multiple logical AOS instances in a cluster. Batch processes run simultaneously with online processes but on separate AOS instances.

AX 2012 R3 demonstrated the ability to scale up and scale out on the AOS tier, and on the database server.

The benchmark results demonstrate the ability of AX 2012 R3 to concurrently handle more complex scenario flows with a very high volume, without compromising performance and scalability for critical business processes.

End of support for Windows 2003 on 14th July, 2015 means no more updates, no more security patches. Don’t miss out on opportunities for success. Upgrade to Windows Server 2012/R2 today- ask us if you need help.

Amazon.com and Microsoft are locked in a battle to determine who will lead the cloud computing age. Corporate America is shifting from client-server computing, which began in the 1990s, to shared computing resources in the Internet cloud.

The cloud age is new but already Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) have emerged as early leaders. Microsoft, dominated during the earlier PC-server computing cycle, and now aims to be a top player in cloud services. Amazon Web Services, part of e-commerce giant Amazon.com, is by far the leader in infrastructure-as-a-service. In IaaS, customers rent computers and data storage via the cloud

Accenture and Microsoft Corp. have expanded their long-standing alliance with the introduction of the Accenture Hybrid Cloud Solution for Microsoft Azure. The companies are co-funding and co-engineering this platform with new hybrid technologies and services to help enterprises to build and to manage enterprise-wide cloud infrastructure and applications.

Microsoft passed a milestone in its business overhaul for the cloud computing age. As 2015 starts, it has become the biggest seller of cloud services to business customers, vaulting past start-ups such as Salesforce.com and outpacing IBM and Oracle. While cloud services account for less than 5 per cent of revenues, the milestone is a sign that the world’s biggest software company is finally making headway as it looks beyond the PC era. (Financial Times)

The big three – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google – have the infrastructure, range of offerings and financial clout to support highly-scalable, global public cloud services, and appear to be locked in a battle to the bottom on price that is unlikely to let up in the coming years.

A new IDC report estimates that in three years more than half of the money spent on software, servers and storage will be attributed to the cloud.

Cloud spending is projected to increase annually by 22.8 percent, nearly six times faster than the overall IT market, to reach $127 billion in 2018.

Analysis of cloud spending shows that 70 percent will be spent on SaaS, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) spending.

After what a company executive said has been a “breakthrough year” in 2014 for its cloud computing business IBM is building out its global computing network to focus on the enterprise cloud market. The company announced that it is adding cloud centers in 11 new locations. In a $1.2 billion investment, IBM has built cloud centers in Frankfurt, Mexico City and Tokyo. The other eight new locations come to IBM through a partnership with Equinix Inc., which operates data centers across the globe. This is also in part a response to laws requiring the local retention of data following revelations over U.S. government Web surveillance as well as increased corporate compliance rules.

IBM has pared down its previously lengthy cloud computing services contracts to a two-page document, replacing what the vendor described as a “complex contract that typically required long negotiations and reviews before a deal was signed.” On cloud contracts, IBM (IBM) apparently not only believes simpler is better but also that streamlining its legal agreements gives it a distinct competitive advantage over its cloud service rivals.

At an event in Boston, Oracle’s cloud head Shawn Price talked about the software giant’s 5-year journey to become a key cloud computing company. Shawn Price spent five months heading up software giant SAP’s cloud efforts until he left the company in an executive reshuffling, only to reappear in October as the lead executive for cloud computing rival Oracle. Two months later, the former CEO of SuccessFactors was a key figure at the company’s Cloud World event, giving a keynote address to promote Oracle’s aggressive efforts to expand its cloud computing capabilities, from optimizing its broad array of enterprise and data base applications for the cloud to reworking its sales teams to deal with the changing ways businesses are buying technology, and with having to sell both cloud-based and on-premises solutions.

Recently, cloud giant Amazon Web Services rebooted its EC2 following a Xen hypervisor issue and it affected many customers. “It is a fact that at the end of the day, whether you’re in a cloud, you’re in a data center or in a server cloud, that there’s hardware and there’s outages,” said Lisa Noon, client partner at Cloud Technology Partners Inc. Noon discussed the AWS reboot among other cloud news on the Cloud Computing Weekly podcast with host David Linthicum

Analysts report that private clouds will reach an 85 percent adoption rate in the coming years.

Security issues are the main factor limiting the further use of cloud computing services, research from Eurostat has found. In a survey conducted by the European Commission’s Eurostat statistics service, public cloud computing was reportedly used by 24% of large enterprises and 12% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the EU.

The Internet of Things, IoT, – a proliferation of sensors and cloud computing gives businesses access to unlimited amounts of data – he challenge in the coming year is to act on key insights, to improve customer service,to reduce time to market, to enable new innovation in product and services development, and to ultimately transform a business with new business models and revenue streams.

Rockwell Automation is a prime example of the transformative power of IoT – Rockwell is building new forms of intelligence to transform the petroleum supply chain by providing managed monitoring and support for its products across the globe. This includes cloud-based solutions that use software, sensors and devices to predict equipment failures along the vast oil and gas supply chain, track performance in real time, and help refine designs and processes to prevent failures in the future.

In 2014, big-name companies in nearly every industry fell victim to cyber-attacks, prompting FBI Director James Corney to say “There are two kinds of big companies in the United States. There are those who’ve been hacked…and those who don’t know they’ve been hacked.” A recent survey by the Ponemon Institute showed the average cost of cybercrime for U.S. retail stores more than doubled from 2013 to an annual average of $8.6 million per company in 2014, and greatly increased in the financial services, technology, and communications sector as well.

One of the big changes we’ll see is a migration to Europay MasterCard and Visa (EMV), a new technology to protect consumers and reduce the costs of fraud. EMV is a global standard for cards equipped with computer chips and the technology used to authenticate chip-card transactions. Coming in October 2015, merchants using non-EMV compliant devices that choose to accept transactions made with EMV-compliant cards assume liability for transactions that are found to be fraudulent. In 2015, we expect this compliance requirement to drive a massive move to modern card technology and modern points-of-sale devices. That translates to better security for banks, merchants and consumers. Ask us about TCPOS

Businesses will make use of big data services in the cloud and we can expect machine learning to grow exponentially across the retail, manufacturing and health care sectors driven by three factors: broader access to machine learning, massive computing power connecting systems and services, and the explosion of online data. These developments create opportunities for organizations to use machine learning for data-driven decisions. For CIOs, this means providing data liquidity: the ability to get data the firm wants into the shape it needs with minimal time, cost and risk. Many large firms have found their big data pilots shut down by compliance officers concerned about legal or regulatory violations. This is particularly an issue when creating new data combinations that include customer data.

On 21 January 2015 at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington headquarters an invitation-only sneak peak at some of the features of the company’s new Windows 10 operating system. The full release of the new OS is expected sometime in mid-2015. Microsoft has been dropping hints about what the new operating system will look and feel like. That experience will include the Cortana digital voice assistant featured on the latest Windows phones, according to a Wall Street Journal blog post.

Among the changes Windows 10 is expected to bring is a return of the Start Menu. The lack of that menu in Windows 8/8.1 alienated many users, in the enterprise environment. Microsoft has said that Windows 10 will feature an extended Start Menu with one-click access to most commonly used functions. It will also enable users to personalize the menu with their own choices of apps and Web sites.

Windows 10 will be targeted especially to business users. It will feature “enterprise-grade security, identity and information protection,” as well as “simplified management and deployment to help lower costs, including in-place upgrades from Windows 7 or 8 that are focused on making device wipe-and-reload scenarios obsolete,” according to Microsoft.

Other new features arriving with Windows 10 are: a multiple-desktop option, special features for users of two-in-one devices, a new Task view button, snap enhancements and a return to resizable windows.

BizTalk Services – Seamlessly integrate the enterprise and the cloud. Windows Azure BizTalk Services (WABS) provides integration capabilities in the cloud for EAI and B2BT and this new service on Windows Azure was made available in November 2013.

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/biztalk-services/

WABS is a cloud integration platform or integration platform as a service or IPaaS.

Build your integration on premise, and deploy in the cloud, where it is hosted in a service (a set of dedicated hardware).

This operates as a subscription model for the IPaaS service in the cloud ( BizTalk Services means running on Windows Azure – hence the name Windows Azure BizTalk Services). Currently there are quite some players offering that kind of service like Dell, Attunity, MuleSoft, TIBCO, and so on.

Recent features adds this year include:
• EDIFACT Protocol Support and X12 Schema Updates
• Pulling Messages from Service Bus Queues and Topics
• Service Bus Shared Access Signatures (SAS) support with Service Bus Queues and Topics
• BizTalk Adapter Services No Longer Needs SQL On Premises
• Backup and Restore Support
• Operation Log Support
• DocumentDB is a recent storage option added to Microsoft Azure. It is a no-sql storage service that stores JSON documents natively and provides indexing capabilities along with other interesting features.

The new features to WABS extended the flexibility and ability to create cloud solutions. However, WABS will need more adapters (sources/destinations) for instance to be able to compete with some of the other IPaaS vendors like MuleSoft.

Most of the configuration of WABS is done through Visual Studio a main component currently to build, deploy and manage a bridge solution. Managing for some parts of a bridge solution like configuration of sources and destinations might be better done in a tool like management console/web application or even within Windows Azure itself.

Last month Microsoft announced that Office apps customers are coming to Android tablets with the start of Office for AndroidTM tablet Preview.

Microsoft is also delivering Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for iPhone® and updates for the iPad apps–

New, touch-optimized Office apps for Windows 10 are in the works

Complete functionality with Office 365

Customers get the best value and a complete set of features from an Office 365 subscription, including 1 terabyte of OneDrive online storage — with unlimited storage on the way. By subscribing, customers join a community of over 7.1 million active Office 365 Home and Office 365 Personal subscribers and unlock the full productivity power of Office on every device they have.

(Ask us about special year end bundled promotions of Office 365, Power BI and On-Line CRM)

Availability:

The new Office for iPad and Office for iPhone apps are available in 29 languages and 136 countries. The apps require an iPad or iPhone running iOS 7.0 or later. The Office for Android tablet preview is available for sign-up beginning today.

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was proposed in 2012 and aims to apply a single set of data protection rules across the European Union (EU) to protect user’s data.

Organisations will be expected to report a breach in 72 hours, and give data owners the right to request a copy of the personal data they hold, and the right to have personal data erased.

The regulation will impose greater fines on organisations that break the law -compliance failures will carry fines of up to €100m or 5% of global turnover – whichever is greater.

The proposed regulations are planned to begin at the end of 2014, coming into effect over the next two years.

A recent survey from network management and monitoring software specialist, Ipswitch showed that
- over half of employees could not accurately describe GDPR
- and 52% admitted their firms were not ready for the changes the regulations might bring.

An interesting finding from an SAP UK and Ireland User Group survey is that:
- SAP customers find the supplier’s account managers insufficiently knowledgeable about their businesses.
- Customers say SAP knows too little about their businesses and is too expensive
- Over 50% of respondents say that SAP account executives don’t have the level of knowledge about customers’ industry or business to help with adopting innovation.
- 74% of respondents said that SAP was bringing out technology innovations at a speed with which they were unable to cope.

SAP’s reputation for high costs was also evidenced by the survey – 15% more respondents (69%) said that SAP licensing and subscription costs were cited as an adoption barrier compared to other vendors (54%)

Synergy is a well established, solution provider across the Middle East region.
Synergy has a strong presence in several key verticals; Manufacturing, Construction, Hospitality Insurance, Financial Services, Government. Media, Oil and Gas, Distribution.
Synergy is particularly well known as a Gold Partner of both Infor Sunsystems, and Microsoft Dynamics Ax and for its implementation expertise and exceptional support. It is based centrally in Dubai in the Karama district since it was registered in 1991, and occupies a 7,000 sq ft office with around 80 full time employees.